It’s stupid to talk about which part of anything could really be the worst part when the thing you’re talking about is that somebody murdered your son, stabbed him thirty-seven times with an oyster-shucking knife, stabbed him in his face and in his throat and in his chest and in his arms and in his stomach and on his hands, which he was probably using to try to protect his face, his beautiful face, but she got him there, too, nine times there, they said. And you were lucky, you wrote, they hadn’t said “lucky” but it was only obvious that was what they meant, that she hadn’t been able to finish cutting both of them apart, otherwise they might not have been able to find all the pieces, the remaining pieces of your son Jesse and his friend Gene, Gene who was always nice to you no matter what people said about him, nobody ever gave him a chance, they talked about him like he was trash but how could he help it, and now he was dead, pieces of him all mixed up in the same garbage bag with Jesse, and you were supposed to feel lucky that they’d even been able to get together enough body parts to make an identification; and that was the first worst part, the part that made you begin to apprehend the dimensions of the cave: the details.
Because they were trying to spare you the worst of the details, they said; but it was also their job to tell you, for the investigation. What investigation? What did anybody need to investigate? The world is so full of people who see what’s going on right in front of their faces, you wrote, but they don’t do anything, police, teachers, your own family, they see and maybe they give you a sad look, but you can take that sad look down to hell with you if you’re ever lucky enough to get there, to get out of this awful place and at least be free, but that was all fairy tales anyway as far as you were concerned, there was no way any of it was true, you hated to say it, on good days you didn’t feel this way at all anymore but today you did, and you wanted me to hear it, to see, to know what it was like except that I would never actually know, because for me all the details were just part of my stupid story, something I did for money, or to show people how smart I was, or who really knows why, but for you the details were like markings on a blueprint, each of them indicating just how much there was to know about the space where you would have to live for the rest of your life, how many things there were to learn that nobody would ever want to learn and which would never leave you once you’d learned them, things which would give you nightmares, and headaches, and would train you to respond to stressful situations in ways that never helped, only hurt, learned responses that made everything worse and made you feel like your mind was your own worst enemy, and who could you turn to if not yourself when all you had ever had was yourself, yourself and Jesse, the one person in this world you’d been able to look at for seventeen years and say, That is a sweet person, he deserves better than what this world has given me, but instead he was lost in the cave now, and you knew you would never find him.
You would never find him: because there was no cave, it only felt like one, you weren’t crazy, you said, you just felt crazy because it was too much to take, too much, you said. You screamed when the officer showed you his necklace and they brought you a blanket, that’s what they do when people are in shock, they give them a blanket, do they think we are babies, but you remembered the blanket, and a paper cup of cold water, and sitting in a wooden chair sipping it while the officers bore witness to your rapidly numbing affect, too much, what next, they had already asked their questions because they knew this would happen, how were you going to tell Michael, what would he do.
You couldn’t tell Michael. He wouldn’t know how to handle it, he only knew how to be angry, he would be angry at you, he would beat you until he broke something, he would punch a cop and get taken to jail, how were you supposed to figure this out when the pressure inside your head was like a shaken-up soda can; but then they told you that they had already sent a police cruiser to get Michael now that you’d identified the body, easier that way, and you didn’t know how to feel, because there wasn’t any room for any other feelings besides the pain, and the horror, and the rage, why had she done it, that bitch, Jesse never hurt anybody in his life, he was the one who always got hurt, and now he was dead, every time you came back to it you couldn’t make yourself believe it, because you didn’t want to believe it, but at the same time you kept trying to get there, you didn’t know why. Instinct. What good had your instincts ever done you, you wrote, they were worthless, you couldn’t trust them, but you were trusting them one more time, just this once, to tell me this, to see if I was a human being instead of a monster.
Instead of a monster, you wrote at the top of a page near the end of your letter. The rest of that page was blank. I closed my eyes and tried to picture you as you might look in the present day, older, greyer, a little closer to the end of a journey whose pleasures had been few and far between: and the face that came through in my efforts seemed real and alive to me, alive in a way I found somewhat frightening, since I spend most of my days imagining people who once lived and breathed squarely within the confines of the space where I sit and write. And I think I do a good job—I have a method—but this was different.
* * *
A PERSON’S SENSE OF TIME gets turned inside out when their whole world gets taken away from them, you said, so you had a hard time connecting the dots from moment to moment when it came time to tell the story of how everything happened after that. There were parts you still couldn’t write down words about, big parts, the main parts, really, and it was making you feel so small and weak that you couldn’t do it, especially since you still had to see everything so vividly in your head, all these years later; but of course how could a person forget seeing the sight of their own son with parts missing, carved off like limbs from a hunted animal. They had put the parts together on a table, and you only looked at them for one split second before the screaming started again. By that time they’d brought Michael in, he wasn’t so tough now, he was scared, scared of the police and the police station and the photographers outside and the reporters yelling questions at him, and he cried: you had only ever seen him so shaken once before, the first time he came back after you left, and the connection you’d once felt to him awakened just long enough for you to hold each other in a way you hadn’t since you both were young: but even in that moment, you’d known it was nothing, nowhere near enough, Scotch tape on a burst pipe, not even a cosmetic fix.
You both stayed at the police station, you said, for the rest of your lives, because, when you left, who knows how many hours later, your lives were over: your lives together, and your individual lives; Michael’s in a real way, because he never recovered and was dead now, cirrhosis, he had been unable to bear Jesse’s death and was never sober again a day in his life, and yours, too, because you had to see everything through to honor Jesse’s memory, you couldn’t just pick up a bottle and disappear into it, you felt bad enough about the sleeping pills but you needed them and that was all there was to it, unless people know what it’s like to lie in the dark remembering their dead child’s body they can hold their tongues about what people do to deal with their own pain, but the life left to you was even less of a life than you’d had before as the punching bag for a guy you’d had a crush on in high school, because now the person for whom you existed couldn’t feel or see or benefit from your efforts in any way, and yet you couldn’t let go.